Pie!

Pie always comes with an exclamation mark in my book - it's just so exciting! Pie, to me, signifies slowing down and taking time to bake something with love (MAKE IT WITH LOVE!). You have to wait for pie. It's a multiple part process - first the bottom crust, then the filling, then a top crust or a crumble topping or, if you're really adventurous, a lattice top. Pies are more complicated than a cake (which just goes in a pan, bakes up, and might get a bit of frosting) or a batch of cookies (which just get plopped on a cookie sheet), or even a fruit cobbler (which, I'm sorry to say, is my go-to dessert in the summer...when I really should be making fruit pies).

Pie is difficult to make with our crazy schedules. That multiple part process is time-consuming, and rolling out a crust is daunting for a lot of people. My crusts are usually somewhat of a patchwork mess - I can never roll a perfect circle, so end up with a crust with the outline of a blob. When I move it into the pie plate, I end up playing doctor and cutting off pieces from the part of the crust that's too big for the plate and using them to cover up the spots that don't completely come together.

One of my favorite "kitch lit" (that's short for "kitchen literature") books is called American Pie: Slices of Life (and Pie) from America's Back Roads. The author, Pascale Le Draoulec, needs to travel from San Francisco to New York, and is looking for something to tie her trip to - something that would give her journey "some sort of peg, a thread" to pull her from one city to another and to show her the "real" America - not the one that shows up on the news all the time. Her trip is amazing - she drives through small towns across the country and just leans her head out the window to ask a stranger where she can get the best pie in town. Whenever possible, she gets the recipes, many of which are tabbed with little Post-Its in my copy of the book.

My favorite recipe is for an apple-blueberry pie, which I make more often than any other pie. The combination of the tart green apples and the even more tart blueberries is perfect to me. Mountain Man prefers the lemon pie my mom has made since I was a kid - she would make it on the weekend and we'd eat it for breakfast with a cold glass of milk before school. Those were my favorite breakfasts, and Mountain Man and I do the same now, swapping the milk for a cup of coffee. My grandmother makes a flat apple pie in a large metal cake pan that is just amazing - when we visit her in Lebanon, she makes it for us, and when she was here last year, my brothers asked her for pie almost as soon as she arrived. I think everyone has a favorite pie. We just have to slow down long enough to enjoy it.

My favorite food podcast is hosting a pie contest here in LA in September and I'm considering entering it. See the entry form here.. I'm not sure what I would make, but it would be great to be a part of a community of pie-makers (and pie-eaters) for a day. I'll let you know if I do it - it would be great to share it with you!